Comment by milesward
...Good?
...Good?
I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have concerns about US based social platforms as well.
It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide what a good outcome would look like.
Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top. TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.
I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own. On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a foreign government and being subjected to political influence is undesirable.
There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even worse.